The Real Thing (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Britain in the Early-1980s

In the 1970s Britain had been torn apart by industrial action and economic depression. Garbage men went on strike; milkmen went on strike; British Rail employees went on strike. Garbage piled up in the streets, milk was not delivered, and people could not rely upon the trains to arrive at work on time. Due to the OPEC boycott (a western abstention from the oil produced in the Middle East), the price of gas skyrocketed. Compounding all these problems was the undeniable fact that British industry was in decline.

Many of Britain’s economic problems in the 1970s had their origins in the Postwar period. After the end of the Second World War, great sections of London had to be re-built and strict food and supply rationing continued well into the 1950s. Although money poured in to Britain to aid the economic recovery, the government channeled much of it into retaining control of the British colonies, the parts of its vast (though soon crumbling) empire. In the long-run, this was a disastrous decision. The British Empire gradually collapsed, and the home economy continued to flounder.

In 1979, after a period of immense social and political turmoil, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conservative Tory party took power in Britain. Mrs. Thatcher promised to end social disruption and to improve industry profitability. The Tory party retained control of Britain for fifteen years and dramatically altered the fabric of British society.

In 1982, Britain and Argentina’s dispute over the Falkland Islands, an obscure island group off the coast of Argentina, escalated into full-scale war. Britain’s victory over Argentina seemed puny in the international scheme of things, but the war galvanized nostalgia for British imperial might and encouraged many people to feel, as Thatcher proclaimed, that “Great Britain is great again.” Nonetheless, within Britain there was a small, vocal group of people who opposed the war.

In the same year, Prince Charles’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer provided the public with a fairy-tale spectacle that brought the monarchy’s popularity to an unprecedented height.

However, not everyone was happy with the direction in which Britain was moving. The eighteen-month long coal-miners’ strike in this same period brutally reminded both British and international observers that economic change had come at great social cost. Homelessness became common in Britain’s major cities, and the low-cost housing estates in the inner-city that had been built in the Postwar period became notorious poverty traps. Racism, too, was a constant problem, as Britain struggled to integrate recent immigrants into a sometimes hostile society. The period in which Stoppard wrote The Real Thing was a mixed bag of goods and attitudes towards the tremendous social and economic change depended very much upon whether one was benefiting or suffering as a result of them.

The British Artistic Tradition of Social Criticism

British artists have a venerable tradition of combining social criticism with artistic innovation, and many people who were unhappy in Thatcher’s Britain looked to the theater and to film for critical representations of contemporary society. Film was a popular medium for the British artistic tradition of social criticism. Screenwriter Hanif Kureshi’s film My Beautiful Laundrette laid bare the racist cancer at the heart of the inner-city, and Richard Attenborough’s Ghandhi presented the Indian perspective on British colonialism and empire building.

In the dramatic realm, John Osborne protested against middle-class convention and brought working-class characters onto the stage in his decade-defining drama, Look Back in Anger (1956). A decade later, Edward Bond, a working-class playwright, attracted enormous controversy with his play Saved (1965), a grim depiction of urban violence and social decay in which a baby is stoned to death in its pram. Harold Pinter, in plays such as The Birthday Party (1958) and The Caretaker (1960), chose not to speak the language of the people but to create his own rhetoric to express the fractured reality he perceived. Stoppard, too, contributed to the British tradition of social criticism with plays such as Professional Foul (1977), which is set in Czechoslovakia and focuses on political dissidents living in a totalitarian society, and Night and Day (1978), which takes place in a fictionalized Africa and examines the role of the press under a dictatorship.

However, at first glance, The Real Thing seems removed from contemporary controversy. But after a more thoughtful examination, it becomes clear that the play takes issue with two pressing social items. In his presentation of Henry and Annie’s relationship, Stoppard touches upon the changing status of marriage, and in the sub-plot about Brodie’s imprisonment, he attacks segments of the anti-war movement.

Attitudes towards divorce have changed greatly in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and early-1960s, it was a social taboo to divorce one’s spouse. Times have changed, and the play’s imagined “society” can accept Henry and Annie’s decision to leave their respective spouses with a degree of understanding. But the price of such social change, Stoppard suggests, is that the post-divorce unions are frequently plagued by uncertainty and distrust.

The other important social issue Stoppard explores in The Real Thing is the British anti-war movement, which focused upon the presence of American bases on British soil and upon Britain’s involvement in the manufacturing and sale of nuclear missiles. One of the most famous anti-war protests during this period was the permanent women-only demonstration outside the Greenam Common missile base. The women’s movement and the antiwar movement often shared the same umbrella, and it is upon this loose alliance that Stoppard turns his rhetorical guns.

In The Real Thing, Annie is active in the antimissile movement. She meets Brodie, a soldier, when she is on her way to a demonstration. He tries to impress her by lighting a fire on the Cenotaph but is promptly arrested. Annie and Max interpret his action sympathetically: Brodie is “an ordinary soldier using his weekend pass to demonstrate against their bloody missiles.” To them, the bases are reprehensible both because they demonstrate society’s commitment to war and because they are evidence of American imperialism.

Henry does not agree. To him, Brodie is an ignorant, thoughtless “vandalizer of a national shrine,” and his character — and his “cause” — is further damaged by his loutish stupidity and goggle-eyed leering at Annie. Stoppard paints Brodie in the most unsympathetic light. He also does an injustice to the movements that Annie espouses: her quick cancellation of a political appointment for sex with Henry, her championing of Brodie because of his infatuation with her, and her ill-conceived idealism, all suggest that her politics are founded on vanity and egoism more than upon carefully reasoned beliefs. Thus some of the play’s central characters, and much of the conflict and the relationships in the play, depend upon Stoppard’s depiction of the antiwar movement; not incidentally, Stoppard actively opposed the Falklands War during the period in which the play debuted.

Compare & Contrast

• 1982: The Dow Jones Industrial average, a barometer of stock market activity, tops the 1000 level for the first time.

  Today: In 1999 the Dow Jones Industrial average tops the 10,000 level for the first time, reflecting a booming American economy, record low unemployment, and stable interest rates.

• 1982: President of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhev, ruler for eighteen years, dies. He is replaced by former KGB chief Yuri Andropov (who dies the following year).

  Today: After the introduction of “peristroika” by President Mikhail Gorbachov, the Soviet Union abandoned communism and centralization in favor of market capitalism and devolution. The current leader of Russia is Boris Yeltsin, whose initially charismatic presidency has since become characterized by erratic behavior and an inability to control economic chaos and endemic corruption.

• 1982: Britain goes to war against Argentina over a territorial dispute involving the Falkland Islands. British forces defeat Argentina after a ten-day battle. Margaret Thatcher declares that “Great Britain was great again.” In Argentina, the defeat leads to mass demonstrations and rioting that eventually topples the military government.

  Today: Britain maintains an active military presence in the Falklands. It is also heavily involved in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military actions in the former Yugoslavia, including Serbia and Kosovo.